"Sapere aude! 'Have courage to use your own reason!' - that is the motto of enlightenment." (Immanuel Kant)

Saturday, August 30, 2008

The Totalization of Shadows, Part III

I am a garden of forking paths and so are you. I approach your garden and you approach mine. I enter your garden, and you enter mine. I can’t find a sensation to match your entry into my garden; you can’t find one to match my entry into yours. We know there’s been entry—or do we?

I want to chart your progression through my garden of forking paths. I can’t directly feel this progression, though—you aren’t equipped with a GPS device issuing a signal my receiver can detect…I can’t map your locations at specific times. Nor can you, mine. And, as I’ve said, I am not even really sure you are in my garden, nor that I am in yours.

Words can come from your lips, reassuring me in various ways. Or are these not paths of your garden I take to wandering, salubrious and refreshing? You speak with forked tongue-- you exist as forks.

These words are reassuring until you start to tell me about things in my own garden of forking paths which I know aren’t true…At least I don’t think they’re true. There isn’t a rose bush where you say there is, and though you are flattering me by telling me how well I tend my roses, knowing I have no roses where you say I have beautiful roses, I become distressed. I think you may be giving me evidence you aren’t really in my garden and I was right to be skeptical.

I haven’t been in every part of my garden—I haven’t taken all of its paths—maybe you are in a part of the garden I’ve never seen. Maybe I’m in a part of your garden you’ve never seen. There are parts of your garden which are so far from the parts of your garden which you frequent that we cannot determine a sense to the words "your garden" in this instance. The same is true for me and mine. It comes down to a judgment of mine to declare this is yet a part of your garden...Same for you. Or we might be willing, heatedly, to declare a frontier.

You give me a report of my garden. I give you a report of yours. We say, “Interesting.”

In my garden, you take a combination of forking paths I would never consider, in a part of my garden where I’ve never been. I take a combination of forking paths in your garden you would find surprising, in a region you describe as uncharted. I am more I in your garden than you; you are more you in my garden than I am I; I might fall apart or call for a parade. Is there any reason for anxiety? Only if there is such a thing as rationality...I guess there is.

7 Comments:

Maybe in the most remote parts of your garden, the twists and forks become so dense that the word 'path' is nomore a useable part of a descriptive vocabulary.

There, try and look out beyond the dim, hazy and seemingly forever stretched out boundary of your garden, where you would expect to find another garden? What do you see there? Can you see them? Huge figures coming out of the mists. Grunting scratching noises.

Who are they? What are they thinking about their world? What vocabulary can you use to answer these questions?

Interestingly, I write something which looked at what happens when the forks become so dense the word 'path' is no more a useable part of a descriptive vocabulary. I had to delete it, though, because it became crazy, and the more I tried to correct it, the worse it got. I'm not sure why. I wondered if it was because at that point the metaphor was breaking down? I want to return to this very matter, because what happens when a metaphor breaks down has to do with discovering something about totalization...I hope, anyway. That's what I'm thinking about now.

Yes, Yusef, I actually read your first post that you deleted - and it was (well) a bit crazy. But still --- where do metaphors go when they die? To the graveyard of the figurative - which is also a garden!

We live and think (to a disturbingly high degree) in the wasteland of dead metaphors.

How do we become the Lazarus'es of metaphors?

And what does that have to do with totalization?

I'm curious and look forward to your reflections on this.

Aren't metaphors - you know: meta? - and thus metaphysical? Is this where we want to go?

"Aren't metaphors - you know: meta? - and thus metaphysical? Is this where we want to go?"

My intention isn't to develop a metaphor--it is to take a look at an image of thought and then go to where it ruptures, which actually isn't that hard to do, in this case.

I have a guilty conscience in that thus far I am not using, am neglecting, "garden of forking paths", as it was used by Deleuze, and the reason may be because I shrink from Deleuzean affirmation-- but maybe I can learn from this, overcome from it.

As always, I am not where I want to be, but maybe I'm moving somewhere.